Granta 17: While Waiting for a War

‘I find myself in 1985 refreshing my memory of 1937 and 1938 in an old commonplace book and very fragmentary diary. There are verses copied there which I must have chosen for their significance at these moments of my life: literary gossip, bizarre crimes and divorces wrenched from newspapers... and then suddenly the digging of trenches on Clapham Common outside our windows, the distribution of gas masks, the evacuation of children, municipal muddle, ending in the temporary peace of Munich – all that period summed up in Stephen Spender’s poem written then: ‘We who live under the shadow of war, What can we do that matters?’.’ Graham Greene, ‘While Waiting for a War’. Plus Alice Munro, John Updike, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro and Marianne Wiggins.

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